Red Dragon Page 0,74
hand. She held him to her breast until she knew he felt her heartbeat. Then she flipped him over and popped the tube down his throat. He took about two ounces and went to sleep.
"Um-hum," she said. She put him down and went about her assigned duties with the diaper pails.
* * *
On the fourth day the nurses moved Marian Dolarhyde Trevane to a private room. Hollyhocks left over from a previous occupant were in an enamel pitcher on the washstand. They had held up pretty well.
Marian was a handsome girl and the puffiness was leaving her face. She looked at the doctor when he started talking to her, his hand on her shoulder. She could smell strong soap on his hand and she thought about the crinkles at the corners of his eyes until she realized what he was saying. Then she closed her eyes and did not open them while they brought the baby in.
Finally she looked. They shut the door when she screamed. Then they gave her a shot.
On the fifth day she left the hospital alone. She didn't know where to go. She could never go home again; her mother had made that clear.
Marian Dolarhyde Trevane counted the steps between the light poles. Each time she passed three poles, she sat on the suitcase to rest. At least she had the suitcase. In every town there was a pawn shop near the bus station. She had learned that traveling with her husband.
Springfieldin 1938 was not a center for plastic surgery. InSpringfield, you wore your face as it was.
A surgeon at City Hospital did the best he could for Francis Dolarhyde, first retracting the front section of his mouth with an elastic band, then closing the clefts in his lip by a rectangular flap technique that is now outmoded. The cosmetic results were not good.
The surgeon had troubled to read up on the problem and decided, correctly, that repair of the infant's hard palate should wait until he was five. To operate sooner would distort the growth of his face.
A local dentist volunteered to make an obturator; which plugged the baby's palate and permitted him to feed without flooding his nose.
The infant went to the Springfield Foundling Home for a year and a half and then to Morgan Lee Memorial Orphanage.
Reverend S. B. "Buddy" Lomax was head of the orphanage. Brother Buddy called the other boys and girls together and told them that Francis was a harelip but they must be careful never to call him a harelip.
Brother Buddy suggested they pray for him.
* * *
Francis Dolarhyde's mother learned to take care of herself in the years following his birth.
Marian Dolarhyde first found a job typing in the office of a ward boss in theSt. LouisDemocratic machine. With his help she had her marriage to the absent Mr. Trevane annulled.
There was no mention of a child in the annulment proceedings.
She had nothing to do with her mother. ("I didn't raise you to slut for that Irish trash" were Mrs. Dolarhyde's parting words to Marian when she left home with Trevane.)
Marian's ex-husband called her once at the office. Sober and pious, he told her he had been saved and wanted to know if he, Marian, and the child he "never had the joy of knowing" might make a new life together. He sounded broke.
Marian told him the child was born dead and she hung up.
He showed up drunk at her boardinghouse with his suitcase.
When she told him to go away, he observed that it was her fault the marriage failed and the child was stillborn. He expressed doubt that the child was his.
In a rage Marian Dolarhyde told Michael Trevane exactly what he had fathered and told him he was welcome to it. She reminded him that there were two cleft palates in the Trevane family.
She put him in the street and told him never to call her again. He didn't. But years later, drunk and brooding over Marian's rich new husband and her fine life, he did call Marian's mother.
He told Mrs. Dolarhyde about the deformed child and said her snag teeth proved the hereditary fault lay with the Dolarhydes.
A week later aKansas Citystreetcar cut Michael Trevane in two.
When Trevane told Mrs. Dolarhyde that Marian had a hidden son, she sat up most of the night. Tall and lean in her rocker, Grandmother Dolarhyde stared into the fire. Toward dawn she began a slow and purposeful rocking.
Somewhere upstairs in the big house, a cracked voice called out